Is XML::LibXML any good?

Yes, it rocks IMHO.

Ultimately, I'm intending to use an XSLT engine to do transformations...

Then using XML::LibXSLT in conjunction with XML::LibXML would be the way to go.

While I don't know the exact answer as to why that test fails, I thought I'd point out another valuable resource for Perl/XML related questions if you're interested. Try checking the perl-xml mailing list archives to see if others have experienced the same problem. If you don't find anything, try posting your question there.

-- vek --